


skin of the teeth

by r1ker



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 09:30:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6233398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r1ker/pseuds/r1ker





	skin of the teeth

Jack wakes up and all he can think about is how much he _hurts_.

 

Every part of him, from the headache pounding at the top of his head, to the ache just south of his heart, hell, to even where his feet are dangling over the edge of his bed, burns. He tries to move but it takes his breath away with how bad it hurts. Tears spring to his eyes as stitches, staples in his chest pull and tug against each other in response to his movements.

 

So, there's not any getting out of this spot for him any time soon, he reckons.

 

He can't anyway. Daniel is lying on him, head resting high on Jack's thigh, mouth open slightly while he breathes quietly in his sleep. Jack puts the back of his hand, mindful of the tubes poking out of it, to Daniel's warm cheek, mostly to check if he was still alive. Jack hadn't seen anyone sleeping that hard in that uncomfortable of a position in his entire life.

 

He snickers a little when he sees how Daniel's hair, having been severely combed the last time, forms a neat little swoop from where it was pressed against Jack's leg. Daniel huffs out a sigh. Jack sees one of his hands twitch on his lap, obviously caught up in some sort of dream. He's a picture.

 

"Took me almost dying for him to realize he didn't entirely hate me," Jack mutters to himself. It could be the medication they've got him on, or the bullet they maybe didn't get all out of his lung, but he could be thinking the thing he and Daniel have danced around for so long might be more than it lets on to be. After all, Jack had been tamping down that part of himself for a long time, and it's looking like it almost took him dying to realize he was in love with Daniel.

 

But then dying would be better than actually letting Daniel know that, of course. He's always done admirably in tamping down whatever he really thought about people – people, of course, being men he'd denied himself for years in the name of sticking himself with women who deserved so much better than him.

 

Daniel deserves better than him, Jack concludes after letting his hand drift into Daniel's mussed hair. His scalp is warm to the touch, thick strands sliding between Jack's fingers, and he presses in a little to let his body know there's something to be felt, and it's not death.

 

But for now he'll act like this will work.

 

Daniel stirs after a while, eases off of Jack with a slow succession of sleepy noises. He takes in a breath when he sees Jack blinking slow, finally awake after weeks of fitful convalescence. If Jack weren't just coming out of a mild coma he'd say he saw tears spring to Daniel's eyes. Well he's coming out of a coma and reassured just as Daniel blinks at him again, a few of them slipping out and down his face.

 

"Sorry," he mumbles to Jack, the palm of his hand scrubbing furiously at a cheek to worry away the tears. "I'm sorry, I – God, you got _shot_ and…" He folds his arms over his chest tightly as he thinks about the phone call he got. It was someone sounding like they were in a real hurry, pinched for time and trying to get out too much too quickly, saying they'd found Jack clinging to life. He'd been sprawled at the foot of his bed, seeping blood into the floor with each passing second before a housekeeper had found him. Then as those words were being spoken the world had stopped, sounds took a bit longer to register, and faces weren't quite as clear as they had been before.

 

Jack had been gray to the gills and completely out once Daniel had been able to round up the medics capable to getting to his part of town. His cheek imprinted with the grain of the carpet, blood ruining his dress shirt, all made Daniel wish he would have been able to carry Jack out of that place.

 

He had resigned himself that night to letting Peggy call the shots, call the right people to get Jack to a private hospital, one she knew would be out of the way of whoever was trying to finish him off. Daniel had given himself 48 hours to not go to Jack, let the doctors try and pull him back from the edge, and at the final second he had granted himself access to the hospital room, and there he stayed.

 

Peggy had pleaded with him on the first night to go home, take a shower, eat something, take a step back for himself. But Jack's behavior hadn't allowed him to do anything but fret; each twitch, every tube the nurses changed was prone to his examination, his meticulous attention. It had certainly been touch-and-go those first few days. Daniel was convinced he'd go mad before the doctors had told him Jack would be conscious; he was sick of having his chest and hands ache from anxiety each time he'd awaken and have a nurse tell him they almost lost Jack in the night. Lost him with Daniel so close by.

 

"Look at it this way," Jack says and he's so put off by his own voice, so hoarse sounding and nearly disembodied from how he remembered himself speaking before he took a bullet to the lung. "We learned that you can shoot me and I live." He tries to laugh but it comes out as a God-awful wheeze that just makes Daniel flinch. "You could have gotten mad at me all you wanted and put one in me and I'd just bounce back."

 

"Yeah, you're Teflon for real," Daniel chokes out, and Jack starts to regret after a while making his cracks. Jack pats the part of the mattress closest to Daniel in apology. Daniel nods, acknowledging that Jack's making do with all he's got, and clears his throat before speaking again. "It had been close, Jack. Closer than anyone has a right to be to something like that." Jack's sick with the way Daniel's eyes run dark, aching down to the bone with worry that disorients.

 

For a second, or perhaps a minute, all the ambience in the room is the loud whirring of a window air conditioning unit that doesn't seem to be chilling much of anything. Jack takes in stilted breaths that become easier to take with each passing second. Daniel just studies him, checks him over from head to toe as if any part of Jack is shifting without him knowing it.

"I didn't feel like I was dying," Jack confesses only to have a crease form in Daniel's brow out of confusion. "I felt like I was going to sleep. That kind of sleep you find yourself in when you're so tired that you have no choice but to give yourself over to it. And nothing can wake you up." He sees Daniel swallow heavy, and nod. Maybe he knew it in the war, God forbid he did, but they all were prone to coming across that feeling while out there. It was unavoidable for even the toughest men, and Jack knew he wouldn't come that close to it again if he had anything to say about it.

 

This time he didn't. Wouldn't have, really, the bastard got him blind. Then again the same had happened in the army.

 

"You were sleeping when they found you alright," Daniel responds grimly, rubbing at his eye with the hand barely holding his head up. Soon his other arm joins the one propped on the bed, provides a rest for his forehead even as his voice falls even further than a whisper. "It had been a while when that housekeeper came in and found you. They said it must have been four, five hours. It was really unclear; she was so hysterical when she called us because she knew you. Knew we weren't going to lose you if we had any say in it."

 

Jack can't stop himself from putting one of his hands on Daniel's forearm. He hasn't felt this sorry for anyone in a while, and he was the one who got shot. Not a lot of people Jack would regard like that, he reckons. "Any longer and you would have been gone for good, but the way you fell… the pressure from how you were laying on the ground stemmed the bleeding long enough to keep you alive. You know, with the way you were turned on the ground." Daniel balls up one of his fists and places it low on his chest to demonstrate and Jack nods once, stiffly.

 

"Long enough to keep me alive," Jack echoes damn near in disbelief. When the bullet had hit him that was the only thing his distressed body had known how to do. Who was he to know that was the right thing? He wasn't, when has he ever known the appropriate direction for much of anything but Daniel… Daniel knows, knows more than he might be letting on. Maybe he'd seen it in years past in men that fell around him and knew the second he'd found out about Jack that this was another soldier that had fallen to the enemy. Or it could be senseless, without direction, but less than likely to Jack. He knew the score when he wasn't even at the game, the whole story even though might have been passing through.

 

"Yes, and you're still here," Daniel reassures and this time it's Jack who takes his hand for a change, holding it tight with his fingers squeezing tight between Daniel's. Daniel looks down at the hand holding onto his for dear life and returns the gesture, bringing it up to press his lips to the surgical tape holding tubes to the skin of Jack's hand. "You're still here, you're real." He brings the hand down from his lips and loosens his grip, still holding it in his to kiss Jack once, twice, on the forehead.

 

Jack doesn't know his eyes had even closed until he hears Daniel sigh again, and opens his eyes to find out what caused it. It was simply feeling Jack's warm skin beneath him that caused that exhale to be released, and from then on it'd be a reminder of just how close the two of them came to the end of it.


End file.
